There is a line running through every attempt to change someone's mind, and most people never name it. On one side is education: you influence someone for their benefit, and they know what you are doing. On the other is manipulation: you influence someone for your benefit, and they do not. How I want to work sits entirely on one side of it.
The test is one question. Would I still do this if the person could see exactly what I was doing and why? If yes, it is persuasion I can stand behind. If I need them not to notice, if the technique only works in the dark, it is manipulation, and it does not matter how well it converts.
Persuasion itself is not the problem. Helping someone see why a true thing is good for them, in words they understand, is honorable work. The problem is deception, and deception is subtler than lying. You can manipulate with entirely true facts by choosing which ones to show, by manufacturing an urgency that is not real, by borrowing an authority you have not earned. The thing to watch is the gap between what you lead someone to believe and what is actually true. Honest influence keeps that gap at zero. Everything worth being ashamed of widens it.
I try to hold this even when it costs me. Writing about my work at Chainflip Building Distribution Before Product Maturity, the protocol had grown a great deal while I was there, and it would have been easy, and effective, to imply I caused it. I did not, and I said so, because a claim I cannot prove is a small manipulation wearing the costume of a credential. The honest version was less impressive and more believable, which is nearly always the trade.
The reason to stay on this side of the line is not only that it is right. It is that it is the only version that compounds. Manipulation works once and leaves the person poorer for having met you. Education works slowly and leaves them better, and people return to what leaves them better. Trust is just the residue of having been treated honestly, again and again, until someone stops checking. You cannot fake that residue. You can only accumulate it, or spend it.
So the standard is not never influence. We influence each other constantly, and pretending otherwise is its own dishonesty. The standard is to influence people toward what is good for them, in the open, in ways you would happily explain out loud. That is the whole difference between selling someone something and helping them see something. Only one of them lasts.